Alongside not wanting to be blamed for the state of society I think there is something about wanting to still be a rebel, I work in a young office in London and when people make their tiresome jokes about the daily mail or the monarchy I really get the sense that they feel they are bravely standing up against the dominant institution in the country, rather than making a statement that for their social group and location in the country is totally mundane. There is still a belief amongst the under 50 liberal class that the country is run by a cabal of aristocrats and outraged retired colonels itching to shut down channel 4 for some slight, when really they now dominate cultural and institutional power. As we see with the taliban fighters gettin upset over having to learn excel, excercising real power sucks its much more fun to be a rebel, even if you're pretending
yeah it's more fun to be shooting down foreign helicopter than having a 9.30 team zoom meeting to discuss the electricity grid.
Although I don't want to fall into the bugman trap of discussing children's films, I really felt that with the last Star Wars series. The obvious story trajectory should have been that, a few decades later, the rebels have themselves become repressive, becoming the things they hate. That would have been interesting. But no, they just repeat the exact same scenario, except now the rebels are multicultural and led by a girl boss. Just reliving a fantasy of rebellion forever.
It would be much more fun to watch a star wars film that followed the course of real rebellions with episode vii being about Han Solo's show trial for bourgeois revisionism
yeah I actually thought about writing a fan-fictions story along these lines years ago in which the former empire longs to have empire back because its fallen to religious fanaticism and various tribal fighting.
The Matt Chorley tweet is indicative of how the media consciously or unconsciously colludes to hide the real nature of Government. The Political and Media Classes like to think that Ministers have actual real power to change things and that serious conversations take place in cabinet and in parliament on policy. In reality 99% of decisions that actually affect the lives of Public are actually taken by Officials in the Cabinet office and Civil Service, Officials who have social views that are to the left of the public (especially on migration). Chorley and the Media are either ignorant of this reality or they just don't want to face it.
Migration is a good example - it’s now 1 million people a year, net 500k, and yet the public argument is about making it easier for people to migrate. Brexit was clearly a vote against immigration yet we now have more that we did in 2016. Whoever is in charge, it isn’t social conservatives
And these 'officials' in turn are massively influenced by the universities that school them, the media and 'culture' they consume, and the social circles they move in, as well as the need to consult 'stakeholders' at every turn - third sector special interest orgs of various different kinds. All walk in lock step with the same set of elite, progressive values, it's a massive hydra without central direction but very much with a single ideological orientation. Tricky to get people who are part of that world to see it for what it is, as no individual or organisation feels (or is) supremely powerful.
Arnold Toynbee thought civilisations failed when the elites ceased to meet the real problems confronting society due to excessive self admiration.
But my favourite explanation of civilisation collapse is that of historian J.D. Unwin who, writing long before the sexual revolution, proposed that the flourishing of civilisation was inversely related to sexual "liberation", with pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy” being especially important for flourishing, and that civilisations upon markedly departing from these rules tended to collapse within 3 generations or so.
I'm afraid there won't be a Sunday newsletter *again* this weekend as I'm too running out of time. It will return though. Thanks for subscribing, and have a happy Easter!
One of the things you gradually realise if (like me) you inhabit a professional milieu where liberal-left elitism is the publicly professed creed is how few people genuinely believe many of the dogma sacred to it. It can take years to find out, though. A colleague whom you've known for ages and whom you count as a friend will look at you with a mildly nervous expression when, after a few glasses of wine, the conversation turns to, say, some of the letters further down the LGBTQ+ rainbow, and will ask, with trepidation, "What do you think about that?"
Of course, it's precisely the lack of genuine belief that accounts for the force with which the doctrine is enforced.
You are on top form at the moment, Ed! I was arguing with my oldest, dearest friend a year or so ago about my reasons for a drift from the old left to something like the SDP position of Right Social, Left Economic.
He was still talking as if the biggest companies in the world were all fossil fuel companies, and their 'cronies' in the media were all on the right and therefore that supporting BLM, trans rights, etc was of a piece with 'bringing economic justice' to society. It was baffling.
I re-trained from corporate life to be a theatre director 10 years ago having always adored theatre. I have since felt utterly alienated from the whole industry and long since focused my attention elsewhere, to the extent I very rarely even go.
It is an extreme example of everything you and Goodwin have written and therefore perhaps useful - 99% of actors, producers, writers and directors far to the left and fighting 'an establishment' that long since ceased to exist. Activists, not artists let alone entertainers celebrating themselves and instructing their audience on the correct views as opposed to opening up the glorious and messy complexity of human beings.
And overwhelmingly middle-class of course whilst ensuring plenty of middle-class actors and directors of colour are highly visible.
You don’t know the half of it. I dated a theater major for a while in college, and whatever smugness you see on stage is twice as bad in their conversations and their little workshop shows that most people don’t see. And this was before the Great Awokening, when there were more normies involved and not every Shakespeare production had to interrogate his whiteness and heteronormativity.
I find these stories heartening in a way because they describe a movement so extreme that it has reached an outer limit and with nowhere else to go even the current audiences will grow tired and then the intergroup tensions, presently managed by militant consensus, will explode. I've been saying similar things about the SNP for years so I claim to have form on this.
re Journalism When I was growing up the BIG employer in West London was the BBC. People in my primary school class-Their parents worked as carpenters, hairdressers, etc for the BBC. There was a large studio complex in North Acton, Television centre in the Bush. Wogan was filmed on the Bush Green. Ordinary people managed to get their sons and daughters jobs behind and occasionally in front of the Camera. You would see BBC talent occasionally in shops or cafe's about the place
Two lads I went to primary school with, managed to start a security business having started as casual security in North Acton. Now, the BBC is nepo babies or Tarquins- upper middle class types as runners, or interns Rather then Paul T from East Acton..
You see this with Alan Partridge- Alan has become the outsider against the Oxbridge/ Nepo Elite who dominate the BBC
Tories are just the finance wing of the same movement. A right wing reaction might tax the banks to build prisons after all
"Many members of this new ‘elite’ are also poor – a feeling made far worse by London’s catastrophic housing market. Academics, who often live in poverty, resent being told they’re part of the elite, even though they have huge cultural power"
I think this is a really important point. Louise Perry noted a while ago that the old (who lean conservative) have all the economic power, while the young (liberal) have all the cultural power. Although I completely agree with your (and Goodwin's) analysis in general, I can understand how a 20-year old, burdened with debt, struggling with rent and burning with idealism about social justice, could look at all the second-home-owning pensioners down the road and come to the conclusion that they need to fight a system that's rigged against them.
It's a really tricky situation. From my perspective, I think that Maitlis/O'Brien/etc liberalism is only going to make this divide worse, but I can see why it would appeal, and why traditional forms of conservativism wouldn't.
Left-wing ideology is egregiously wrong about everything, and lies are necessary to deal with that wrongness. The typical lie is that the Left is never actually in power, and that is why the problems it purports to be able to solve actually get worse.
I wonder if it's true that NO ONE wants to be told they're part of the elite or whether it's only, or mainly, progressives, who have built their whole identity around 'sticking it to the man'. After all, once you ARE the man, where do you go? The 'eternal rebels' of your title is correct.
'The new elite is just as present on the right, reflected in the likes of Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Sarah Wollaston — culturally left conservatives who vigorously opposed Brexit'.
I really don't get why such people are considered conservative. Because they are in the Conservative Party? In the same way Nigel Farage must have been in favour of EU membership because he was an MEP, right?
I loved this. I work (vaguely) in wine and it creates a microcosm of social life in general, as it has done in many cultures. Commentators and brands often stand bravely against “the red trouser brigade” and all the “stuffiness and snobbery” of wine. But nobody ever offers any examples of it. And those who are most critical largely come from white, middle-class, well-off backgrounds, based in London. Which would seem to describe a privileged minority, irrespective of the colour of their trousers
On point as per. Left media and especially the Guardian have a complete blind spot on this stuff - they consider themselves the permanent counterculture and inheritors of 68. Instead they have become a class of elite scolds. Which is why they completely fail to understand the attraction of these Andrew Tate types to teenage boys - it's cos these people are bad boys and inherently countercultural (the clue is in the term).
Also neat reference to Bell - I often wonder how one of the beats would fare today. Could you imagine the reaction to Burroughs?
Excellent and thoughtful. The new elites won’t accept that they are in fact elites because they still believe they are the edgy rebels they thought they there at university. They still think they are fighting the right wing press, the aristocracy, reactionary judges, entrenched privilege, racism and patriarchy while also being tediously conformist. They have their bogeymen and won’t let go of them.
"Britain’s newspapers have long had a Right-wing bias, although more so among tabloids, whose power to influence opinion is very limited." This is an interesting assertion. Do you think the claim that "It's The Sun Wot Won It" was mere guff? Admittedly, that was thirty years ago, when newspapers had a much wider readership. But I remember at the time a lot of people on the left being convinced that a right-wing press had cost Kinnock the election. Tony Blair certainly thought so; he invested a lot of time and effort in getting the Murdoch press in particular onside. Do you think he was wrong? (My personal view is that while tabloids don't influence elite opinion, they do influence, or at least used to influence, mass voting behaviour).
Of course you're quite right about the importance of intra-elite competition. Can't we relate that to your claim that "the main divide in British politics until the 1960s was over resources"? I can't help feeling that a central though generally unspoken priority of the modern elite, left or right, is to keep the discussion away from resources, and particularly, away from contemplating the kind of mixed economies and moderate redistributive policies that made Western Europe work so well in the 1950s and 1960s, and which really did undermine the position of the prewar elites. The mutual imperative to keep the conversation away from that topic is, I think, the main reason why the culture war is so bitter.
Thus, worrying (as the liberal-left elite does) about whether there are enough people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, etc, represented at the higher levels of management is a way of avoiding reflection on why the gap between managerial salaries and ordinary workers' salaries has remorseless grown, and whether it might usefully be narrowed. Since most members of the liberal elite occupy precisely those managerial positions, they have a vested interest in shutting down any conversations about a more egalitarian salary scale.
Meanwhile, since Thatcherite economics are even more unpopular than Blairite economics, the right has a strong incentive to keep waging the culture war... but less of an incentive (at least in the short term) to win it, since a definitive victory would shift the political debate straight back to resources.
I can't help feeling that a genuine Red Tory or Blue Labour party (economically of the centre left, but moderately social conservative) would sweep the polls, at least to the extent that it was given a fair hearing.
Alongside not wanting to be blamed for the state of society I think there is something about wanting to still be a rebel, I work in a young office in London and when people make their tiresome jokes about the daily mail or the monarchy I really get the sense that they feel they are bravely standing up against the dominant institution in the country, rather than making a statement that for their social group and location in the country is totally mundane. There is still a belief amongst the under 50 liberal class that the country is run by a cabal of aristocrats and outraged retired colonels itching to shut down channel 4 for some slight, when really they now dominate cultural and institutional power. As we see with the taliban fighters gettin upset over having to learn excel, excercising real power sucks its much more fun to be a rebel, even if you're pretending
yeah it's more fun to be shooting down foreign helicopter than having a 9.30 team zoom meeting to discuss the electricity grid.
Although I don't want to fall into the bugman trap of discussing children's films, I really felt that with the last Star Wars series. The obvious story trajectory should have been that, a few decades later, the rebels have themselves become repressive, becoming the things they hate. That would have been interesting. But no, they just repeat the exact same scenario, except now the rebels are multicultural and led by a girl boss. Just reliving a fantasy of rebellion forever.
It would be much more fun to watch a star wars film that followed the course of real rebellions with episode vii being about Han Solo's show trial for bourgeois revisionism
yeah I actually thought about writing a fan-fictions story along these lines years ago in which the former empire longs to have empire back because its fallen to religious fanaticism and various tribal fighting.
That is the plot of Foundation, which Apple TV has been ruining...
Charlemagne in space? I'd read it!
Fantastic Article Ed.
The Matt Chorley tweet is indicative of how the media consciously or unconsciously colludes to hide the real nature of Government. The Political and Media Classes like to think that Ministers have actual real power to change things and that serious conversations take place in cabinet and in parliament on policy. In reality 99% of decisions that actually affect the lives of Public are actually taken by Officials in the Cabinet office and Civil Service, Officials who have social views that are to the left of the public (especially on migration). Chorley and the Media are either ignorant of this reality or they just don't want to face it.
Migration is a good example - it’s now 1 million people a year, net 500k, and yet the public argument is about making it easier for people to migrate. Brexit was clearly a vote against immigration yet we now have more that we did in 2016. Whoever is in charge, it isn’t social conservatives
And these 'officials' in turn are massively influenced by the universities that school them, the media and 'culture' they consume, and the social circles they move in, as well as the need to consult 'stakeholders' at every turn - third sector special interest orgs of various different kinds. All walk in lock step with the same set of elite, progressive values, it's a massive hydra without central direction but very much with a single ideological orientation. Tricky to get people who are part of that world to see it for what it is, as no individual or organisation feels (or is) supremely powerful.
Arnold Toynbee thought civilisations failed when the elites ceased to meet the real problems confronting society due to excessive self admiration.
But my favourite explanation of civilisation collapse is that of historian J.D. Unwin who, writing long before the sexual revolution, proposed that the flourishing of civilisation was inversely related to sexual "liberation", with pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy” being especially important for flourishing, and that civilisations upon markedly departing from these rules tended to collapse within 3 generations or so.
so I guess we've got one left then!
Just as well our trajectory has no end of days feel to it!
I'm afraid there won't be a Sunday newsletter *again* this weekend as I'm too running out of time. It will return though. Thanks for subscribing, and have a happy Easter!
Excellent piece.
" ... a quite simple test of who wields power is ‘what are people’s politics like in private compared to what they are like in public.’ "
Very insightful.
One of the things you gradually realise if (like me) you inhabit a professional milieu where liberal-left elitism is the publicly professed creed is how few people genuinely believe many of the dogma sacred to it. It can take years to find out, though. A colleague whom you've known for ages and whom you count as a friend will look at you with a mildly nervous expression when, after a few glasses of wine, the conversation turns to, say, some of the letters further down the LGBTQ+ rainbow, and will ask, with trepidation, "What do you think about that?"
Of course, it's precisely the lack of genuine belief that accounts for the force with which the doctrine is enforced.
Yes, the more people who have to be bullied into professing something completely bonkers, the more forceful the the bullies have to be.
Very true here in America.
I think it's true everywhere. If you can make people keep silent about or whisper what they really think, you have power.
You are on top form at the moment, Ed! I was arguing with my oldest, dearest friend a year or so ago about my reasons for a drift from the old left to something like the SDP position of Right Social, Left Economic.
He was still talking as if the biggest companies in the world were all fossil fuel companies, and their 'cronies' in the media were all on the right and therefore that supporting BLM, trans rights, etc was of a piece with 'bringing economic justice' to society. It was baffling.
thanks!
I have been slightly distracted by writing this book, which is not entirely unlike Goodwin's tbf.
I re-trained from corporate life to be a theatre director 10 years ago having always adored theatre. I have since felt utterly alienated from the whole industry and long since focused my attention elsewhere, to the extent I very rarely even go.
It is an extreme example of everything you and Goodwin have written and therefore perhaps useful - 99% of actors, producers, writers and directors far to the left and fighting 'an establishment' that long since ceased to exist. Activists, not artists let alone entertainers celebrating themselves and instructing their audience on the correct views as opposed to opening up the glorious and messy complexity of human beings.
And overwhelmingly middle-class of course whilst ensuring plenty of middle-class actors and directors of colour are highly visible.
I'm not surprised. I find so much theatre very hard to take because I find the smugness and unquestioning moral superiority overwhelming.
You don’t know the half of it. I dated a theater major for a while in college, and whatever smugness you see on stage is twice as bad in their conversations and their little workshop shows that most people don’t see. And this was before the Great Awokening, when there were more normies involved and not every Shakespeare production had to interrogate his whiteness and heteronormativity.
I find these stories heartening in a way because they describe a movement so extreme that it has reached an outer limit and with nowhere else to go even the current audiences will grow tired and then the intergroup tensions, presently managed by militant consensus, will explode. I've been saying similar things about the SNP for years so I claim to have form on this.
re Journalism When I was growing up the BIG employer in West London was the BBC. People in my primary school class-Their parents worked as carpenters, hairdressers, etc for the BBC. There was a large studio complex in North Acton, Television centre in the Bush. Wogan was filmed on the Bush Green. Ordinary people managed to get their sons and daughters jobs behind and occasionally in front of the Camera. You would see BBC talent occasionally in shops or cafe's about the place
Two lads I went to primary school with, managed to start a security business having started as casual security in North Acton. Now, the BBC is nepo babies or Tarquins- upper middle class types as runners, or interns Rather then Paul T from East Acton..
You see this with Alan Partridge- Alan has become the outsider against the Oxbridge/ Nepo Elite who dominate the BBC
Tories are just the finance wing of the same movement. A right wing reaction might tax the banks to build prisons after all
"Many members of this new ‘elite’ are also poor – a feeling made far worse by London’s catastrophic housing market. Academics, who often live in poverty, resent being told they’re part of the elite, even though they have huge cultural power"
I think this is a really important point. Louise Perry noted a while ago that the old (who lean conservative) have all the economic power, while the young (liberal) have all the cultural power. Although I completely agree with your (and Goodwin's) analysis in general, I can understand how a 20-year old, burdened with debt, struggling with rent and burning with idealism about social justice, could look at all the second-home-owning pensioners down the road and come to the conclusion that they need to fight a system that's rigged against them.
It's a really tricky situation. From my perspective, I think that Maitlis/O'Brien/etc liberalism is only going to make this divide worse, but I can see why it would appeal, and why traditional forms of conservativism wouldn't.
Left-wing ideology is egregiously wrong about everything, and lies are necessary to deal with that wrongness. The typical lie is that the Left is never actually in power, and that is why the problems it purports to be able to solve actually get worse.
I wonder if it's true that NO ONE wants to be told they're part of the elite or whether it's only, or mainly, progressives, who have built their whole identity around 'sticking it to the man'. After all, once you ARE the man, where do you go? The 'eternal rebels' of your title is correct.
'The new elite is just as present on the right, reflected in the likes of Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and Sarah Wollaston — culturally left conservatives who vigorously opposed Brexit'.
I really don't get why such people are considered conservative. Because they are in the Conservative Party? In the same way Nigel Farage must have been in favour of EU membership because he was an MEP, right?
I loved this. I work (vaguely) in wine and it creates a microcosm of social life in general, as it has done in many cultures. Commentators and brands often stand bravely against “the red trouser brigade” and all the “stuffiness and snobbery” of wine. But nobody ever offers any examples of it. And those who are most critical largely come from white, middle-class, well-off backgrounds, based in London. Which would seem to describe a privileged minority, irrespective of the colour of their trousers
On point as per. Left media and especially the Guardian have a complete blind spot on this stuff - they consider themselves the permanent counterculture and inheritors of 68. Instead they have become a class of elite scolds. Which is why they completely fail to understand the attraction of these Andrew Tate types to teenage boys - it's cos these people are bad boys and inherently countercultural (the clue is in the term).
Also neat reference to Bell - I often wonder how one of the beats would fare today. Could you imagine the reaction to Burroughs?
Excellent and thoughtful. The new elites won’t accept that they are in fact elites because they still believe they are the edgy rebels they thought they there at university. They still think they are fighting the right wing press, the aristocracy, reactionary judges, entrenched privilege, racism and patriarchy while also being tediously conformist. They have their bogeymen and won’t let go of them.
"Britain’s newspapers have long had a Right-wing bias, although more so among tabloids, whose power to influence opinion is very limited." This is an interesting assertion. Do you think the claim that "It's The Sun Wot Won It" was mere guff? Admittedly, that was thirty years ago, when newspapers had a much wider readership. But I remember at the time a lot of people on the left being convinced that a right-wing press had cost Kinnock the election. Tony Blair certainly thought so; he invested a lot of time and effort in getting the Murdoch press in particular onside. Do you think he was wrong? (My personal view is that while tabloids don't influence elite opinion, they do influence, or at least used to influence, mass voting behaviour).
Of course you're quite right about the importance of intra-elite competition. Can't we relate that to your claim that "the main divide in British politics until the 1960s was over resources"? I can't help feeling that a central though generally unspoken priority of the modern elite, left or right, is to keep the discussion away from resources, and particularly, away from contemplating the kind of mixed economies and moderate redistributive policies that made Western Europe work so well in the 1950s and 1960s, and which really did undermine the position of the prewar elites. The mutual imperative to keep the conversation away from that topic is, I think, the main reason why the culture war is so bitter.
Thus, worrying (as the liberal-left elite does) about whether there are enough people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, etc, represented at the higher levels of management is a way of avoiding reflection on why the gap between managerial salaries and ordinary workers' salaries has remorseless grown, and whether it might usefully be narrowed. Since most members of the liberal elite occupy precisely those managerial positions, they have a vested interest in shutting down any conversations about a more egalitarian salary scale.
Meanwhile, since Thatcherite economics are even more unpopular than Blairite economics, the right has a strong incentive to keep waging the culture war... but less of an incentive (at least in the short term) to win it, since a definitive victory would shift the political debate straight back to resources.
I can't help feeling that a genuine Red Tory or Blue Labour party (economically of the centre left, but moderately social conservative) would sweep the polls, at least to the extent that it was given a fair hearing.
Communist societies were/are all very keen on the idea of permanent revolution, perhaps for that reason.